Classic Novels Book Club: The Top 200 Works of Fiction

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When I launched the Classic Novels Book Club read more here) in July 2018, it was based on a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all-time. You can see that original list here. In January 2026, however, the list was revised as the group neared completion of the top 100 books. Below is the revised list of the top 200 works of fiction of all time as of 1/31/2026. Those books which the group has already read or are scheduled to read have been highlighted. 2026 rank / 2018 rank / Author / Book Title / Year of Publication (4) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) (1) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) (2) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) (3) George Orwell 1984 (1949) (11) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) (9) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) (19) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (7) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) (5) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) (6) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) (16) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) (8) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) (25) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) (20) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) (30) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) (12) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) (17) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) (14) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) (77) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) (10) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) (43) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) (28) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) (15) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) (21) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) (18) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) (56) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) (32) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) (31) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) (23) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) (38) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) (13) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) (27) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) (29) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) (52) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) (26) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) (24) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) (22) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) (44) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) (82) Marcel Proust Swann’s Way (1913), part one of In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927) (57) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) (39) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) (35) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) (54) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (53) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) (64) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) (40) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) (36) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) (34) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) (49) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) (37) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) (73) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) (47) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) (33) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) (78) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) (58) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) (61) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) (55) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (42) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) (46) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) (79) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) (85) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) (45) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (69) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) (50) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) (72) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) (71) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) (48) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) (41) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) (66) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) (--) Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (1995) (51) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) (60) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) (63) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) (84) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) (68) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) (67) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) (83) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) (65) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) (--) Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (2008) (86) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) (--) Makus Zusak The Book Thief (2005) (99) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) (74) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (59) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) (76) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (91) Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (O Alquimista) (1988) (96) Franz Kafka The Trial (1925) (--) Madeline L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time (1962) (--) Lois Lowry The Giver (1993) (62) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) (--) Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387) (--) Bram Stoker Dracula (1897) (81) John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) (70) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) (--) Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2003) (92) Stephen King The Stand (1978) (75) Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) (--) Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) (80) Jane Austen Emma (1816) (--) S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1967) (98) Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) (90) William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848) (--) Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) (87) Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide (1759) (--) Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner (2003) (93) John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) (--) Gabriel Garcia Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) (--) Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose (1980) (--) Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers (1844) (89) Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) (--) Orson Scott Card Ender’s Game (1968) (--) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) (--) George R.R. Martin A Game of Thrones (1996) (--) Cormac McCarthy The Road (2007) (--) John Green The Fault in Our Stars (2012) (100) Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1767) (--) Stephanie Meyer Twilight (2005) (--) Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) (--) John Milton Paradise Lost (1667) (--) Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden (1987) (--) anonymous Arabian Nights (aka “One Thousand and One Nights”) (800 A.D.) (--) Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) (--) Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915) (--) Agathie Christie And Then There Were None (1939) (--) Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) (94) Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (--) Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843) (--) Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939) (--) Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) (--) Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946) (--) Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (1967) (88) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) (--) Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012) (--) Jules Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) (--) John Irving The World According to Garp (1978) (--) Upton Sinclair The Jungle (1906) (--) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier (1915) (--) Stendhal The Red and the Black (1830) (--) Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929) (--) Fyodor Dostoyevski The Idiot (1869) (--) Charles Dickens Bleak House (1853) (--) Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009) (95) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) (--) Henry Fielding Tom Jones (aka “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”) (1749) (--) Ian McEwan Atonement (2001) (--) John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) (--) Willa Cather My Antonia (1918) (--) Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) (--) Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible (1998) (--) Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1962) (--) Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) (97) Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (--) Herman Hesse Siddhartha (1922) (--) Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) (--) Ayn Rand The Fountainhead (1943) (--) Jane Austen Persuasion (1818) (--) Charles Dickens Oliver Twist (1838) (--) Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain (1924) (--) William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! (1936) (--) E.M. Forster Howards End (1910) (--) Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano (1947) (--) D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913) (--) John Steinbeck East of Eden (1952) (--) Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962) (--) Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860) (--) Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934) (--) Rick Riordan The Lightning Thief (2005) (--) John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960) (--) Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977) (--) H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1898) (--) Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969) (--) Veronica Roth Divergent (2011) (--) Lewis Carroll Through the Looking Glass (1871) (--) Pearl Buck The Good Earth (1931) (--) William Styron Sophie’s Choice (1979) (--) Stephen Cane The Red Badge of Courage (1895) (--) H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) (--) Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex (2003) (--) Laurra Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie (1935) (--) Anna Sewell Black Beauty (1877) (--) Joseph Conrad Lord Jim (1900) (--) Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992) (--) W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage (1915) (--) L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) (--) Jonathan Franzen The Corrections (2001) (--) Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925) (--) Yann Martel Life of Pi (2001) (--) Wilkie Collins The Moonstone (1868) (--) Norton Juster The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) (--) Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) (--) Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (--) Robert A. Heinlein Stranger in a Stanger Land (1961) (--) Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932) (--) Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones (2002) (--) Walker Percy The Moviegoer (1961) (--) Kate Chopin The Awakening (1899) (--) D.H. Lawrence Women in Love (1920) (--) Edith Wharton The House of Mirth (1905) (--) Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934) (--) Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure (1895) Resources and Related Links: Classic Novels Book Club: Writ by Whit Page Classic Novels Book Club: Meetup Site The Top 100 Works of Fiction (revised) Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: Fiction” Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: General” First posted 6/26/2018; last updated 2/3/2026.

 

Classic Novels Book Club: The Top 100

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When I launched the Classic Novels Book Club read more here) in July 2018, it was based on a a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all-time. That list has been revised (posted here), but the original has been left in tact here. Highlighted titles are those which the book club has read or is scheduled to read as of 11/11/2025. You can click on book titles to link to more detailed pages about those books. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) George Orwell 1984 (1949) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Jane Austen Emma (1816) John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) Marcel Proust Swann’s Way (1913), part one of In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide (1759) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848) Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (O Alquimista) (1988) Stephen King The Stand (1978) John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Franz Kafka The Trial (1925) Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1767) Resources and Related Links: Classic Novels Book Club: Writ by Whit Page Classic Novels Book Club: Meetup Site The Top 100 Works of Fiction (revised) Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: Fiction” Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: General” First posted 6/26/2018; last updated 11/12/2025.

All Time Best Books: Top 100

First posted 5/26/2018; updated 11/11/2025.

All-Time Books: Top 100

Inspired by the 2018 PBS special The Great American Read, I assembled more than 170 best-of-books lists (see sources here) and aggregated them to create one master list of the all-time books. While these are mostly novels, there are some non-fiction books and even a few children’s picture books. Here are the results: Various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1610) Mao Tse-Tung Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (aka “Little Red Book”) (1964) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) George Orwell 1984 (1949) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) (1947) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) Muhammad Qu’ran (632 CE) Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) (1995), first book of His Dark Materials series (1995-2000) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (1964) Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) Henry David Thoreau Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) Plato The Republic (380 B.C.) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy: 2008-2010) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962) Alex Haley and Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) Georges Simenon Maigret (series, 1931-1972) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603) Resources and Related Links: General (non-specific genre lists) Writ by Whit (lists specially assembled by Dave Whitaker) General (non-specific genre lists) Fiction Non-Fiction Children’s Picture Books and Read-Alouds Novels for Children and Young Adults Reviews/Where to Buy and Download Books Sales

 

The All-Time Top 100 Works of Fiction

First posted 6/26/2018; updated 7/5/2020.

Fiction: Top 100 Novels

These are the best fiction books of all-time, according to an aggregate of more than 20 lists focused specifically on fiction books and another 50+ general book lists. Note: this list was originally posted in June 2018 and that version was used as the springboard for the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the original list here. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) George Orwell 1984 (1949) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series: 1997-2007) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series: 1950-1956) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) (1995) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (2008) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) Lois Lowry The Giver (1993) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) Madeleine L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time (1962) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387) Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1967) Franz Kafka The Trial (1925) Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004) William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603) Stephen King The Stand (1978) Bram Stoker Dracula (1897) Resources and Related Links: Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: Fiction” Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: General”

Amazon: Top 100 Books

First posted 6/25/2020.

Amazon: Top 100 Books

This list was created by aggregating six different Amazon lists (see details at bottom of page). F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) George Orwell 1984 (1949) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy: 2008-2010) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) John Green The Fault in Our Stars (2012) George R.R. Martin A Game of Thrones (1996) Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012) Laura Hillenbrand Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival (2010) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible (1998) Cormac McCarthy The Road (2007) Veronica Roth Divergent (2011) R.J. Palacio Wonder (2012) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train (2015) E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey (trilogy: 2011-2012) Liane Moriarty The Husband’s Secret (2013) Kathyrn Stockett The Help (2009) Todd Burpo & Lynn Vincent Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back (2010) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) Rick Riordan The Lightning Thief (2005) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Lois Lowry The Giver (1994) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Chris McDougall Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009) Abraham Verghese Cutting for Stone (2009) Brené Brown Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Kate Atkinson Life After Life (2013) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) Doris Kearns Goodwin Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) Erik Larson The Devil in the White City (2003) Rebecca Skloot The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) Stephen King The Shining (1977) Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) Neil Gaiman American Gods (2001) Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) (1947) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988) Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992) Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series: 1950-1956) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Stephenie Meyer Twilight (2005) John Steinbeck The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) Andy Weir The Martian (2011) Edwin A. Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) Rick Yancey The First Book of the 5th Wave (2013) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Stephen Chbosky The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters (1942) Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Sarah J. Maas Throne of Glass (2013) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) John Green Looking for Alaska (2005) Spencer Johnson Who Moved My Cheese? (1998) Tom Rath Strengths Finder 2.0 (2007) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Kristin Hannah The Nightingale (2015) Albert Camus The Stranger (L’Etranger) (1942) James Dashner The Maze Runner (2009) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See (2015) Ayn Rand The Fountainhead (1943) Resources and Related Links: Amazon Books editors’ 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime The link above goes directly to Amazon, but can also be found at thegreatestbooks.org. Amazon UK (1/15/2018). “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime” Amazon UK editors picked 100 essential books – mostly fiction, but some non-fiction. Includes children’s books. A slightly different version of the list was posted at thegreatestbooks.org. Amazon.com “Classic Literature and Fiction” Amazon “Most Reviewed” This is a top 100 ranked list on GoodReads of books on Amazon with at least 3000 reviews. Amazon “Must Read Books of All Time” A Kindle edition on Amazon of 11 classics. Amazon “Top 20 Best-selling Books of All Time”

10 Books Which Impacted Me

First posted 2/9/2019.

These are the books which have most inspired me to read, write, imagine, and create. These titles span from childhood to adulthood, presented (as much as I can remember) in the order in which I discovered them.

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A.A. Milne The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh (1994)

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This is a packaging of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and House at Pooh Corner (1928), the two classics which introduced the world to Christopher Robin and Pooh, his stuffed-animal bear. Pooh is a self-admitted bear-of-very-little-brain, but his optimism and heart of gold modeled a way of life we should all try to emulate. In fact, Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh (1982) is another favorite book of mine because of how well it captures the essence of Pooh in describing a philosophy of life.

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J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)

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In the summer after my sixth grade year, my family went down to Georgia for a week, as we did every summer. My grandmother was bed-ridden and a neighbor, feeling like my brother and I might be bored, brought over a box of books. I plucked The Hobbit from the stack. I’d heard of it, but didn’t know much about it. I devoured it that week – and many times after that throughout junior high and high school. Read a more in-depth review of the book here.

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John Steinbeck Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

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This was Steinbeck’s adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and my introduction to King Arthur when I read it in English class in 8th grade. It led to a fascination with King Arthur, even resulting in me writing my middle-grade fiction series, Otter and Arthur, which retold the legends of King Arthur through the eyes of a mouse.

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Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

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Like millions of others, I was exposed to this book as required reading in high school. Also like millions of others, I was completely drawn in by Lee’s powerful story about Scout, a young girl who comes face-to-face with racial discrimination in her small town – and recognizes her own prejudices in how she judges her reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley. Having re-read the book multiple times, I’ve come to be enamored with the story-telling style of the book and how it makes the small-town setting essential to the book. Read a more detailed review of the book here.

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John Irving The World According to Garp (1978)

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I saw the movie version of Garp when I was in high school. I watched it because I was a Robin Williams fan, but fell in love with the movie because of its quirky characters and unique story. I eventually read the book, which led me to devour everything Irving had written prior to that. Since then, A Prayer for Owen Meany has supplanted Garp as my favorite John Irving novel and one of my favorite books of all-time, but this was the one which introduced me to him as an author.

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Joel Whitburn Top Pop Singles 1955-1996 (1997)

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As a music chart fanatic, I was overjoyed when I found Whitburn’s Record Research company, which published books compiling chart data from Billboard magazine. The granddaddy of them all was this book, which gathered data for all songs to ever hit the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart and then listed them by the recording acts. Not only have I gone through multiple editions of this book, but I have gone on to line my shelves with other Record Research books covering rock, country, R&B, and album charts.

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Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen Type Talk: The 16 Personality Types That Determine How We Live, Love, and Work (1989)

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I dropped out of college in 1989, a semester-shy from graduating. It forced me to go to work and I stumbled into the afterschool arena. I soon realized that was what I wanted to do with my life and within a few years finished my degree. In that second time around, I was reinvigorated by having a career focus and specifically wanting to gain a better insight into personality types and how they affect learning. One of my professors steered me toward the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and whetted an appetite in me for recognizing how people learn differently.

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Dave Whitaker Games, Games, Games: Creating Hundreds of Group Games and Sports (1996)

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Sometime in the mid-‘90s, my supervisor recommended I go to the airport to meet Rich Scofield, a publisher in the afterschool arena. I showed him the game activity book I’d created for work and he told me it could practically be published as it was. This was not only the first of some twenty-something books I’ve now published (see my author page at Amazon), but sowed the seeds for me to start my own company, Toolbox Training, focused on providing resources, training, and consulting to afterschool programs.

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Dave Marsh Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (1989)

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The Whitburn books fed my interest in charts. This book fed my interest in collecting lists which ranked songs without consideration to chart performance. It led to the creation of my Dave’s Music Database website and my own self-published, list-oriented books, including The Top 100 Songs of the Rock Era, 1954-1999, The Top 100 Albums of All Time, and The Top 100 Songs of the Pre-Era, 1890-1953.

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Howard Gardner Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983)

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My undergraduate degree was marked by my fascination with Myers-Briggs. My pursuit of a Masters in Education in the early 2000’s was marked by my discovery of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Like Myers-Briggs, it had important implications on my understanding of how people learned differently – and deserved to be understood as individuals. My final thesis resulted in my second published book, Multiple Intelligences & After-School Environments: Keeping All Children in Mind (2002).

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The Great American Read

Updated 10/24/2018.

image from wttw.com

From PBS.org: “The Great American Read was an eight-part series with viewer participation to select America’s favorite novel, told through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels. It investigated writers’ fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what the 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience.”

The results of the vote are posted here. You can read more about individual books by clicking on titles below or going to the original page at PBS.org.

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1. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
2. Diana Gabaldon Outlander (series, 1991-2014)
3. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007)
4. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
5. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) (1955)
6. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
7. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
8. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
9. C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956)
10. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)

11. L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
12. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
13. Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
14. Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
15. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
16. Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009)
17. Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
18. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
19. Agatha Christie And Then There Were None (1939)
20. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

21. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
22. Larry McMurty Lonesome Dove (1985)
23. Ken Follett The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
24. Stephen King The Stand (1978)
25. Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
26. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
27. Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
28. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
29. Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
30. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

31. Wilson Rawls Where the Red Fern Grows (1974)
32. S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1968)
33. Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004)
34. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
35. Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
36. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (1943)
37. Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
38. Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)
39. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
40. Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy, 2008-2010)

41. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
42. Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club (1989)
43. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
44. Lois Lowry The Giver (1994)
45. Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
46. Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
47. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
48. George R.R. Martin The Game of Thrones (series, 1996-2011)
49. Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy (series, 1951-1953)
50. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)

51. Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
52. Michael Crichton Jurassic Park (1990)
53. Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969)
54. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
55. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
56. Nicholas Sparks The Notebook (1996)
57. William P. Young The Shack (2007)
58. John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
59. Tom Clancy The Hunt for Red October (1984)
60. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)

61. Andy Weir The Martian (2011)
62. Robert Jordan Wheel of Time (series, 1990-2013)>
63. Herman Hesse Siddhartha (1922)
64. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
65. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
66. Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
67. John Knowles A Separate Peace (1959)
68. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
69. Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones (2002)
70. Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)

71. Gary Paulsen Hatchet (1987)
72. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
73. Stephenie Meyer The Twilight Saga (series, 2005-2008)
74. Armistead Maupin Tales of the City (series, 1978-2014)
75. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
76. Ernest Cline Ready Player One (2011)
77. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Left Behind (1995-2007)
78. Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012)
79. Dean Koontz The Watchers (1987)
80. John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

81. James Patterson Alex Cross Mysteries (series, 1993-2018)
82. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
83. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
84. Marilynne Robinson Gilead (2005)
85. V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic (1979)
86. E.L. James Fifty Shades (series, 2011-2012)
87. Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan (1959)
88. Frank E. Peretti This Present Darkness (1986)
89. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013)
90. James Baldwin Another Country (1962)

91. Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima (1972)
92. John Green Looking for Alaska (2005)
93. Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)
94. Robert R. McCammon Swan Song (1987)
95. Dave Hunt The Mind Invaders (1989)
96. Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)
97. Jason Reynolds Ghost (2016)
98. Sister Soujah The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
99. Colson Whitehead The Intuitionist (1999)
100. Romulo Gallegos Doña Bárbara (1929)

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